Thanks to the MCubed program, ECE faculty are teaming up with colleagues across the University of Michigan - from Epidemiology to Political Science, Ophthalmology to Psychiatry, Neurosurgery to Astronomy - to pursue new initiatives deemed to have major societal impact.

The MCubed program was established to minimize "the time between idea conception and successful research results by providing immediate startup funds for novel, high-risk and transformative research projects."

Here are the MCubed projects that involve our faculty in Electrical and Computer Engineering:

Brain machine interfaces for the treatment of paralysis will require implantable devices that can record from hundreds of neural channels simultaneously. The team will attempt to dramatically lower the power consumption of the implant without suffering any measurable drop in signal quality. [more info]

Glaucoma is a sight-threatening condition which affects over 2 million Americans. This collaborative effort hopes to design a novel implant that can effectively lower the eye pressure and prevent worsening of glaucoma. [more info]

Graphene supports strongly confined surface plasmons at infrared frequencies that can be tuned using a gate voltage. In this work, these surface plasmons will be used to generate reconfigurable, TM-polarized Bessel beams for microscopy applications and micromanipulation. [more info]

The team will attempt to tackle questions about our Universe that can best be answered by combining observations with advances in imaging analysis, non-parametric statistics, inference through machine learning, and high dimensional hypothesis testing and regression statistics. [more info]

The team will design and fabricate different types of LED-based light sources exhibiting different lighting characteristics and study the effects of these LED light sources within specially designed luminous environments. [more info]

The team will study how variations in energy access at the local level can lead to economic and political instability in a study region spanning North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Central Asia. [more info]

To better diagnose diseases such as ADHD, autism, and schizophrenia, the team will use advanced pattern classification methods derived from statistics and computer science to discover hidden patterns in diseased brains, patterns too subtle and distributed to be detected by human observers. [more info]

The team has identified novel ALDH inhibitors that deplete ovarian cancer stem cells, and will attempt to determine the mechanism by which this occurs, and the impact of these inhibitors on stem cell survival. [more info]

This project will investigate mapping of temporal relationships between brain regions using a new class of ultrafast functional brain MRI using imaging methods based on sparse random sampling with physiologically relevant models to represent brain signals. [more info]

Patients, families, and clinicians must work together to maintain optimal health status levels, intervening at the earliest possible moment when warranted. This team is developing a novel system for outpatient monitoring and early intervention. [more info]

This project focuses on the development of a new approach for designing efficient and wide-band energy harvesters capable of capturing stray EM energy from the environment. The proposed application is for use in long term autonomous low power wireless sensor nodes, especially to determine the health of civilian infrastructures like bridges and roads.

This collaboration will foster an understanding of how proteins adopt very ordered aggregates called amyloid. Amyloid formation has a long-standing link to human neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. [more info]

Recent advances in nuclear detection capabilities, including new detection materials and readout electronics, promise to have an impact in the development of new cancer therapy treatments. This project relies on neutron and photon detection techniques to develop new instruments and algorithms that will be applied in cancer treatment facilities. [more info]

A mathematical, scientific and measurement framework for the assessment of water balance and water qualityLaura Balzano with CEE and Graham Institute

This project will develop a comprehensive framework to enable the long-term, measurement and analysis of multiple water quality and water quantity stressors across massive regions. The Great Lakes watershed will be studied as a motivating example, where, by most metrics, water quality is in dire need of restoration. [more info]